About your IU passphrase

Important:

If you have not changed your passphrase in
two years, IU requires that you do so. If you do not, your passphrase
will expire and you will be unable to log into most IU services. See
Why is my IU passphrase expiring?

Passwords and passphrases

Passwords are short sequences of letters, numbers, and symbols that you enter to verify your identity to a system in order to access secure data or other resources. Passphrases operate on the same principle and are used in the same way, but differ from traditional passwords in two aspects:

Passphrases are generally longer than passwords. While passwords can frequently be as short as six or even four characters, passphrases have larger minimum lengths and, in practice, typical passphrases might be 20 or 30 characters long or longer. This greater length provides more powerful security; it is far more difficult for a cracker to break a 25-character passphrase than an eight-character password.

The rules for valid passphrases differ from those for passwords. Systems that use shorter passwords often disallow actual words or names, which are notoriously insecure; instead, your password is usually an apparently random sequence of characters. The greater length of passphrases, by contrast, allows you to create an easily memorizable phrase rather than a cryptic series of letters, numbers, and symbols.